How to help people become all they are
A well documented path towards contentment, happiness or enlightenment is to move from trying to:
Be the best ⬇️
Be the best I can be ⬇️
Be what I am.
As is often said, “comparison is the thief of joy”, so how can we help this happen for ourselves and the people in our teams?
It is impossible to tell someone what to do. In order for their purpose to be real and enjoyable, they need to find it for themselves. Even within the confines of a company, or a managerial relationship you have no right to develop people into a certain solution, space or role until they are ready. It simply never ends well for anyone.
The process to find what you really want to do can be lengthy and sadly many of us never do find out what our passion is, let alone have the chance to follow it.
Leaders need to create the environments for people in their teams to flourish. The best way to do that is to help people find what they love doing. Obviously confines exist — especially within work — but the aim is to find the best solution possible within the moments that you have. Here are a few ideas for how you can do that:
Help people practically explore what they want to do
As a leader, you may not have responsibility for finding peoples’ purpose — but you do have the ability to create an environment that is better for doing so.
Explore other roles
There are likely lots of different roles and responsibilities where you work. Give people the time and space to shadow what other people are doing and find out what it entails. Whilst it’s dangerous to compare ourselves to others, there’s no doubt that seeing the skills and strengths that people need in roles helps us to explore our own desires.
Create transparency to help absorb what people actually do
By creating a more transparent team structure, then people can absorb others’ roles by osmosis. Regularly share what people are working on, the decisions they’re making and the tasks they’re being assigned so others can see and perhaps explore for themselves.
Model curiosity
As a leader, we can model curiosity as a behaviour and the benefits that it brings. Keep your reading, inspiration and content coming from a wide range of sources. Experience it and then share what you learn either directly or by creating content based upon it (see what i’m doing here?!). Make sure you create content that makes sense to other peoples’ experience rather than your own though. Make it real for people.
Memories are stories we tell ourselves — use that to your advantage
You can explore peoples’ previous experiences, with the framing that our memories are just stories that we tell ourselves. That means that we can adapt our reflections on events or perhaps even drop them altogether if they’re not helpful for us moving forward.
This can be particularly powerful in situations or experiences where our internal negativity bias takes control. These beliefs often limit how much we and our teams think we can achieve, when they in fact have no basis in reality.
For example, do you have a perception you were never good at art in school so you could never be a graphic designer? The likelihood is that you had moments but you’ve forgotten them as part of a narrative about yourself that has been self-reinforcing.
So explore these memories and put a different spin on them — or just leave them behind and focus on what you need to do now to get better at that particular skill.
Vary work to keep people out of ‘survival mode’
When you’re in this frame of mind, you’re just looking for short term wins that can ‘keep the wolf from the door’. We rarely think about why we’re doing our tasks — we just try and get through them as quickly as possible.
This means that we’re less likely to be doing things that bring us joy or exploring new opportunities to do so. If this continues for any length of time, then it’ll lead to a fading of passion, excitement and love for what people do.
Within any professional environment it’s probably natural to have periods of time which are more ‘survival’ than others. As a leader it’s your role to make sure that these don’t roll into one another and create a feeling which is overwhelming.
This is usually a combination of delivery focussed projects and more strategic or research led work.
Embrace the moments you’re in
If we can be more present in the work that we do, then we’re more likely to create connections between different ideas and identify our passions.
Turn off as many notifications as you can
It’s well known that the more red dots we have bouncing on our phones or laptops the more likely we are to be distracted. It’s not just down to this — whenever we get to a tricky piece of work, we’re more likely to switch out to something else simpler (what could be simpler than Twitter!?!?).
However if you reduce some of the temptations you might have a bit more time looking at your primary task.
When you’re taking this practice seriously, it’s still important to manage expectations of those trying to get in touch. So make sure you set an out of office, or Slack / Teams status to say when you’ll come back or who else people can contact if they need help.
Don’t run a video call whilst also typing notes or messaging others
It’s so obvious to people when you’re doing something else in a session, even over a video call. There will always be tasks to complete as part of calls, like adding a follow up action to a project management board.
The important thing to do is to avoid keeping on top of your emails or Slack / Teams conversations whilst having a discussion with somebody else.
This extends to workshops. If at all possible, allow people to focus on an individual task. So rather than facilitating a discussion as well as writing notes, try to get one person to take on each task. Each will be better for it.
Actively listen to the words that people are saying rather than what we think they’re saying
By focussing on the conversation that’s happening, you’re more likely to really hear what someone else is trying to communicate. This can be much more than what they’re saying and requires you to ask questions that help them explore their perspective.
This is much easier said than done and takes a lifetime of practice. However you’ve got much more chance of doing so if you’re focussed on the conversation at hand.
Create a team who are all following their passion together
Teams of people are magic. When working well, they can do more with less whilst having a lot more fun.
Like anything, those who are really good at it make it look effortless. However as always, this belies how much work is going on underneath the surface.
Build understanding and respect for different disciplines
It’s easy to assume how much people know about what other people do. Especially as a leader as you probably see a lot of all the disciplines in your team.
Without a practical understanding of what people are doing day to day and the value it brings, it’s much harder to emphasise and respect these expertise. The best teams ensure that they build this understanding through proactive discussion, transparency and sharing.
This respect of other people means that the most effective teams know that if someone else is looking after a task, they trust it’s handled.
Let people focus on what they do best to add to the team
It’s easy to place people into boxes that help the wider team. You see a market opportunity or a type of work you want to do and you hope that someone will help you get there. However, to really help people become fulfilled, you have to encourage them to find what they want to do and get better at it.
This can be extremely difficult in a work context — if someone decides that they want to be a landscape gardener and you run a digital design business, then it might be hard to make that work.
But if you at least start with the idea that your product is built around what your team wants to do, then you’ve got a better chance of creating sustainable success.
Spend 10 minutes a day doing nothing
The simple act of allowing your mind to explore different possibilities, is a skill that you can practice and become expert at. When developed, it helps people to come to new conclusions, build their confidence and rest.
It’s impossible to say that you couldn’t find 10 minutes out of your day to sit down, close your eyes and focus on your breath. You might not want to, but that’s a decision you are making and hence you can change if you want to.
This practice, especially if combined with some guidance through something like Headspace, will help you focus on the now. You literally exercise the mechanisms in your brain that allow you to do so.
If you need to, then work up to how long you spend doing nothing. If it’s just a minute or two a day to start with then that’s a great start.
A top tip is to try and find an easy to access physical space that can be about this and nothing else. Your brain will start to associate that location with this practice and help you form the habit.
Many of these thoughts come from listening to the CEO Podcast with Jonny Wilkinson. In it he spoke deeply and eloquently about his journey to discover what he actually enjoys doing, rather than what he thinks will make him happy.
Jimmy Carr, speaking on the same podcast, describes a similar experience where he got to his mid twenties without ever really making a decision about the direction of his life. At that point he stopped, gave himself space to find what he loved doing (in his instance comedy) and has pursued relentlessly ever since.
Both allude to the idea of genuine contentment not being about comparing ourselves to others, or even our own expectations of ourselves, but experiencing the now as well as you can. If you’re truly in the moment, then the past and future don’t exist, so pressure, expectations and comparisons are less likely to manifest.
